Capacitors for use in electronic instruments such as potable telephone and personal computer are demanded to have a small size and a large capacitance. Among these capacitors, a tantalum capacitor is preferred because of its large capacitance for the size and good performance. In this tantalum capacitor, a sintered body of tantalum powder is generally used for the anode moiety. In order to increase the capacitance of the tantalum capacitor, it is necessary to increase the weight of the sintered body or to use a sintered body increased in the surface area by pulverizing the tantalum powder.
The former method of increasing the weight of the sintered body necessarily involves enlargement of the capacitor shape and cannot satisfy the requirement for downsizing. On the other hand, in the latter method of pulverizing tantalum powder to increase the surface area, the pore size of the tantalum sintered body decreases or closed pores increase at the stage of sintering and therefore, impregnation of the cathode agent in the later process becomes difficult. As one of means for solving these problems, a capacitor using a sintered body of powder of a material having a dielectric constant larger than that of tantalum is being studied. The material having a larger dielectric constant includes niobium.
However, niobium has a large affinity for oxygen as compared with tantalum and therefore, is readily oxidized. This tendency is more outstanding as the niobium is in the form of powder and the specific surface area thereof is larger. Furthermore, the oxidation reaction more readily proceeds as the temperature in the environment is higher. In the manufacture of a sintered body from a niobium powder, a molded article of niobium powder is usually sintered under heating in a vacuum and in this process, a reaction with oxygen in an air takes place in some cases at the time of taking out the sintered body from the heating furnace to allow a large amount of oxygen to adhere to the surface. If the amount of oxygen adhered is large, the shape of the sintered body deviates from the designed value in an extreme case. If a capacitor is manufactured from such a sintered body and subjected to an accelerated test at a high temperature, the capacitor performance is sometimes greatly deteriorated and not satisfied in view of reliability.
As for a technology related to the present invention, a capacitor using a partially reduced niobium oxide (NbOn, n=0.7 to 1.1, oxygen content: 11 to 16% by mass) obtained by heat-treating diniobium pentoxide (Nb2O5) in the presence of hydrogen, which has a large capacitance and excellent leakage current characteristics, has been proposed (see, WO 00/15555). However, when a capacitor is manufactured using a niobium oxide obtained in a test by the present inventors and subjected to an accelerated test at a high temperature, the capacitor performance is deteriorated and not satisfied.